IWC Schaffhausen Celebrates 150 Years

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In the 1880s, under Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenk, IWC began producing thousands of pocket watches featuring jumping numerals in an avant-garde digital display. Clockwise from top left: an open-face pocket watch with digital numerals and Cyrillic inscription, 1886; a Hunter pocket watch, 1887; and an open-face pocket watch with digital display and French inscription, 1885.

By Victoria Gomelsky

Jan. 16, 2018

GENEVA — In 1868, a 27-year-old American engineer named Florentine Ariosto Jones arrived in Schaffhausen, a Rhine River town in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, intent on teaching the Swiss a thing or two about watchmaking.

Though Mr. Jones returned to the United States seven years later, it is a testament to his efforts that the company he founded turns 150 this year. It is also the ultimate success of his revolutionary vision, which helped transform what had been one of Switzerland’s home-based industries into the industrial powerhouse it is today.

The brand, now called IWC Schaffhausen and owned by Compagnie Financière Richemont, is marking the milestone with a global series of events, including an exhibition of contemporary and historic timepieces that will travel the world from May through November. The festivities are to begin this week at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva. The actor Bradley Cooper, IWC’s newest celebrity ambassador, is to join the singers Aloe Blacc and Ronan Keating there as well as Cate Blanchett and James Marsden, both longtime ambassadors, at a gala dinner to celebrate Mr. Jones’s forward-thinking ethos.

“Jones was hugely visionary,” said Christoph Grainger-Herr, IWC’s chief executive. “He had a platform assembly idea for creating pocket watches on a shared base with shared components. It was one basic system, very advanced.”

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Florentine Ariosto Jones, the American engineer who founded the company now known as IWC Schaffhausen in 1868.

Mr. Jones’s successor at the company, the Swiss industrialist Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenk, embraced the American’s approach to watch manufacturing. During his tenure, IWC began producing thousands of pocket watches featuring jumping numerals in an avant-garde digital display.

Known as Pallwebers — for Josef Pallweber, the Austrian watchmaker who invented the system of rotating discs — the pieces provided the blueprint for the IWC Tribute to Pallweber Edition 150 Years, the flagship wristwatch of a 27-piece Jubilee collection that will be introduced in Geneva this week.

“The Pallweber really touched me when I saw it in a museum nine years ago,” the IWC creative director Christian Knoop said, “because I imagined what people in the 19th century must have felt when they saw these watches. It was a new archetype of a watch.”

Reworked to modern standards of precision and reliability, the Pallweber limited edition leads an anniversary collection that includes additions to IWC’s Portugieser, Portofino, Pilot’s Watch and Da Vinci families.

Featuring special dials imprinted in white or blue lacquer, the Jubilee timepieces were designed to reflect the brand’s signature Bauhaus-inspired simplicity. “We don’t have decorated dials or skeletonized movements for the art of it,” Mr. Knoop said. “Everything we do has a function, a clean and timeless aesthetic.”

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The IWC Tribute to Pallweber Edition 150 Years, the flagship wristwatch of a 27-piece Jubilee collection. Josef Pallweber, an Austrian watchmaker, invented the system of rotating discs with jumping numerals.

That’s especially true of IWC’s most ambitious project to date: a headquarters encompassing more than 145,300 square feet of space scheduled to open this spring on the outskirts of Schaffhausen. The two-story building, which will unite every aspect of the company’s production (now at several sites in the city center), will be designed, as its rooftop restaurant might suggest, for the benefit of visitors.

“The 8,000-plus people who visit us every year will understand how we get from a bar of steel to the finished watch,” said Mr. Grainger-Herr, an architect who joined IWC in 2005 to oversee the design of its museum in Schaffhausen.

“We make highly emotional, highly evocative products,” he added. “The narrative you build is equally important as the product itself.”

Case in point: Les Aviateurs, IWC’s first pilot-themed bar, which opened two months ago next door to the brand’s boutique on the Rue du Rhône in Geneva. Styled like a gentleman’s club, the bar, a joint effort with the high-end department store Globus, serves cocktails like the Aviator, a $26 concoction of Aviation American gin, Champagne and lavender syrup.